194. Trump Vs Netanyahu: Who’s Calling The Shots?

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Ask your doctor about Tramphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit TramphyaRadio.com. Hello and welcome to The Rest Is Politics U.S. with me, Katty Kay. And me, Anthony Scaramucci. Good morning, Katty. So, Anthony, how are you? How are you spending Monday evening? The only thing, by the way, for all of our listeners around the world that anyone in the States is interested in right now, and particularly anyone in New York City is interested in right now, is? Well, I'm going to the Knick final, but Trump's going also to the Knick final, so he's got the entire city on lockdown. So, c'est la vie. Raining on New York's parade. Yeah, it's all good. No problem. I just said I didn't want my kids to miss it, so I bought the tickets. We're ready to go. Let's go New York. Everyone's going to be excited. But in the meantime, are we fighting? Katty, tell me how you define a ceasefire. The president says, well, you know, a ceasefire on the other side of the world may or may not be a ceasefire. There are a few bombs here and there. I thought that was just a very interesting way of saying other people do things differently from how we do them. Tell me how do you define a ceasefire and are we in a ceasefire right now, Katty Kay? I think what matters is the countries that are fighting, not the geographical location of the ceasefire. I'm just going to posit it a bit like that. If the United States is fighting, whether it's in the Middle East or in Latin America or in the United States or in Asia, a ceasefire is a ceasefire is a ceasefire, and this doesn't seem to be one. So, we're going to be talking about that in the first half of the program and whether Donald Trump has just boxed himself in in such a way that he's got to try and put pressure on Israel. He desperately doesn't want to get back into a fighting match with Iran. His options, his roadmap for getting out of this thing, a lot of those exits seem to be blocked at the moment, and they're blocked by decisions of his own making. In the second half, we're going to talk about Donald Trump's interview with Meet the Press on NBC that ended in a walkout after a rather contentious debate over, yes, the 2020 election and the January the 6th riot. Good. I want to talk about that with you because you're the media person. I just play a media person on this podcast, but you're the media person. I really want to understand NBC, CBS, mainstream news media, where are things going in this country and around the world? And what is the discussion about how to handle Donald Trump? And why is it that he has now been on our radars since 2015, but I still think we haven't quite figured out how to handle somebody who routinely lies to journalists' faces? Okay. So let's start though with what is happening in the Middle East and this ceasefire that is not a ceasefire or maybe it is a ceasefire, but it depends on how much pressure Iran is going to put on Israel and how much pressure Trump is going to put on Israel as well. So where do you think we are, Antony? Because I think this is one of those moments where we seem to have rowed back from a huge amount of escalation. We had this situation where the Israelis hit Beirut, the Iranians had signaled they wouldn't tolerate that, so the Iranians hit Israel. Israel then retaliated against Iran, but in a fairly limited way after Donald Trump called Benjamin Netanyahu and says, "Do not burn Tehran to the ground," which is what some Israeli politicians were asking for and calling for. And I thought it was such an interesting moment where you had Donald Trump making major international policies that affected his America's allies, but how was he doing it? He was doing it by answering journalists' phone calls again. Every time there seems to be a moment of tension in the Middle East and things flare up again, Donald Trump, of course, gets a string of phone calls from reporters in Washington DC. And what does he do? He tells those reporters what he is about to tell Benjamin Netanyahu. So Netanyahu hears it from the Financial Times or from Axios, exactly what Trump is going to do. And I think that it's symbolic of the kind of chaos in the decision-making. This is malpractice from a diplomatic standpoint to be answering phone calls and announcing your policy to journalists before you've told your ally what the policy is going to be. But that is perhaps not the only thing we need to take away from this incident. What did you make of it? For people that want to really understand Donald Trump, whatever the norms are, I'm above those norms, and so it doesn't matter. So if the norms are talking, talking about talking to my allies quietly, talking to my adversaries quietly, well, I'm not going to do that because those are the norms. And so I am telling you, everybody prior to me is a dummy, and every procedure and protocol that's happened before me is ill-advised and dumb. And so only I am the person that's able to do things. And so therefore, I'll do the things exactly the way I want them, whatever I want them. And your job is to be in the sidecar with me and do exactly what I want when I want them. And so that's the biggest problem here. But I want to go to the Israelis for a second because the Israelis are definitely not on Trump's page. And you know that, and I know that. And so the Israelis are like, we're being threatened by Hezbollah in the north from Lebanon. These guys want to take us out with a nuclear weapon, likely. The prime minister of Israel, we can debate his strategy. Because I think he's hurt the Israeli brand, if I'm being honest. That's not anti-Semitic to say that, okay? I'm a pro-Semite. But I think he's hurt the Israeli brand because of the way he's approaching things. There's no delicacy to what he's doing. And so the Israeli position right now, he's going to back the deal, but he's still going to shoot missiles into Lebanon. And that's not going to work, Caddy. So for me, you're not going to get a Hezbollah carve out of this, this, this. And I'm not going to get a Hezbollah carve out of this, this. And you're either going to have a ceasefire and the stuff's going to end. But I think Netanyahu's in a terrible position because I think he's boxed in from both sides. The opposition leader is accusing Netanyahu of failing to secure Israel's demands as part of the ceasefire. That's Yair Lapid. He's got the ultra-Orthodox coalition, which has been with him the whole time, super mad at him because they feel like, believe it or not, he's been too weak on this stuff. So reconcile the relationship between Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump and the triangulation. with Iran and why, and again, I'll just state my opinion first, I don't think they get to a deal anytime soon. No, I think, okay. So I think that's the one thing we can take away from this is that there is not a deal coming anytime soon. And we can get to oil markets reactions to all of this in a second, because I do want to ask you about that. But I think Iran has imposed a new equation on the region just in the last 48 hours. Trump has made it completely clear that he has run out of patience with fighting. He has said as much, I was getting bored. The whole process was getting boring. He wants this whole thing over. And the message there to Iran right now, after that phone call that Donald Trump had with Netanyahu yesterday saying, do not strike back, do not make this another big escalation. The message to Tehran, you can strike Israel without retaliation, without the risk of Israel retaliating against you because Donald Trump will protect you. At the moment, American gas prices are shielding Iran from retaliation by Israel. That is a phenomenal turn of events. Imagine if that had been Barack Obama. Imagine if Barack Obama had protected the Ayatollahs against America's number one ally in the region, Israel, because of high gas prices. Because that's effectively what happened in the last 24 hours. Let's go to that thing, because I think this is very important. Why is Trump treated differently than Barack Obama? Because if I listed everything that Trump has done, and I said, Barack Obama did these things, Washington would be on fire. Yeah. And I would say actually, and it's pointed out very often by the Obama team, Barack Obama was a very good guy. He was a very good guy. He was America's first black president, and his room for maneuver was much more limited in terms of what acceptable from the mainstream, from the press, from the Republican Party. And I think there's some justification to that. But I don't know that it was just Barack Obama. I chose Barack Obama there. But if Joe Biden had done that, he would have been hammered as well, particularly by the Republican Party. And the real biggest difference is, it's not just the press. It's more that Donald Trump controls the Republican Party. And so even though you have hawks in the Republican Party who are appalled at what they're seeing, you have staunch Israel allies in the Republican Party who are appalled at the idea that Israel does not have a right to defend itself in this situation. Donald Trump owns the Republican Party. That's the single biggest difference. The single most powerful driver here is that Donald Trump owns the Republican Party. And that's the single biggest difference. Donald Trump owns his party. Okay. I want to take you into the TripUS Situation Room. Oh, good. Okay. Okay. And now we're going to- Are we both being promoted? Do we have like buttons and stuff we can press? You're the one that's promoted. Okay. No one's letting me near any buttons, Katty. Ask my wife. I'm not allowed near any buttons, not even the ignition. You're barely allowed to the Knicks game this evening without escort. Not even allowed to the ignition to my car. But we're in the Situation Room. We're in the TripUS Situation Room. And I'm going to posit something. And then- And then I need you now to make the decisions. Okay. Ready? Yeah. So we are sitting here. Iran attacked Israel. Israel attacked Iran. That's this morning's news. And then Iran announces that they're done attacking Israel. Yeah. Right? Saw that. Okay. So now I am going to posit to you that there's a 50 to 55% chance that we have a limp along deal where we get to a perpetually fragile non-war. So it's sort of like two frozen transactional relationship where they go for 60 days without fighting. And I'm going to now say to you three things. You tell me if you agree with any of them because I was working on this this morning. Iran, everybody that I talked to on Wall Street, all the analysts in the Middle East that I'm close to, they are economically battered. Okay. They definitely need to sell oil. Okay. So they cannot afford a real war at this point if they're just going to be honest with everybody. Trump also needs oil. Yes. To be under $100. Okay. He's got to get this inflation down before the midterms and they're feeling the pinch. So for those two reasons, I do think we are in a quagmire, but we're in sort of a stalemate, which could reduce prices. But here's the spoiler, Caddy, and here's the question. Israel's a spoiler. It's the one party that's been restrained here rather than empowered. And they've got a political. They've got a political tug of war going on inside the country about what they should do and how they should deviate from the United States. And so what would you recommend to President Trump to get Israel on side? Trump is running out of options in the region. And Iran has exposed his lack of power in the region. But the one lever of real power that he does still have in this conflict is his ability is to restore power. And that's what he's doing. Now, by calling up journalists and telling them what he's doing, he's kind of giving Iran a live feed of American decision-making process during a shooting war. He's also burning some bridges with Benjamin Netanyahu. But Benjamin Netanyahu can't, Mr. President, actually do very much at all without American support. It needs American search and rescue. It needs American refueling. It needs American. logistics. So when Donald Trump tells the Financial Times, my friend Ed Luce at the Financial Times, who's one of those journalists who's got his numbers and just calls them up, I call all the shots. In a way, Donald Trump is right. Yes, there was a small retaliation, but it was a kind of kabuki retaliation. America calls the shots when it comes to Israel. For Netanyahu, this is a disastrous situation because he's looking at the choice between staying out of prison by being reelected. It is existential for him. He's got to win that election. But in order to win that election, he's got to be tough on Iran. And yet there is Donald Trump, who is so desperate not to have a resumption of fighting that he is saying, you can't do that, which means that Netanyahu could be pushed into a position where he has to admit electoral defeat at home. Because Trump has made it very clear he's not going to resume this fighting. And he's not going to let Israel screw it up for him. So if I want to manipulate Trump, because what we know now is that he's calling journalists and he's free-forming and effectively laundering the strategies of the American government. And so if I want to manipulate Trump, how do I do that? Because what's happening here- If you're Netanyahu, you mean? Netanyahu, yeah. Even the Iranians. But he's hand-in-hand with the Iranians. He's hand-in-hand with the Iranians. He's hand-in-hand with the counter-parties, both Netanyahu and Iran, frankly, a free read on his psychology. So now how would you manipulate him, if you could? Well, first of all, I wouldn't have him speaking to journalists. I mean, I really wouldn't. I don't think that- But he's going to do that anyway. He's going to do that anyway. Mr. President, I'd like you to stop speaking to journalists. You're hurting our ability to get the peace. F you, and you're fired after 11 days. I'm going to continue to speak to journalists. Okay. But then what would you do? Recognizing that you have Trump in power, and you're recognizing that this is the disaster that is Donald Trump. So what would you do? I think you need to get to two things, right? You need to create space for the negotiations to succeed. And that's going to mean a couple of things. One is that the Iranians are going to have to have some kind of upfront payment. Like you say, they're running out of money. They need money now. Sanctions relief won't cut it. They're going to have to have some kind of upfront payment. The return on that is going to take too long. They need some assets unfrozen. So you need Trump to get to a position where he can describe unfrozen assets as being the very opposite of what Barack Obama did when he gave Iran unfrozen assets. You're going to have to trick him into thinking there is a way to sell unfrozen assets, Iranian assets, back to Iran, as a win. Because without that, I don't see how he gets a deal. And he really wants a deal. The trouble is he's gone around telling everyone who will listen in Washington, including members of Congress I've spoken to, that the one thing he doesn't want is money going to the Iranians up front. He's going to have to swallow that. That has to be on the table if you want to get some kind of a deal. Otherwise, diplomacy is not going to work. So he's going to be able to present himself, and you're going to have to give him the language to present himself as the master negotiator. He's going to be able to present himself as the master negotiator, who managed to get the Iranians to reopen the Strait of Hormuz for very little money that was theirs anyway, while we got access to the nuclear dust that they had already agreed to water down. Well, I mean, for me, okay, I'm going to put myself in the Israeli position here for a second, recognize everything I know about Trump. I would go to Trump and say, listen, I'll trade the Lebanon front. You want the deal. I get that. You're telling everybody no nuclear weapons, no nuclear weapons. I'm going to go to Trump and say, listen, I'll trade the Lebanon front, nuclear weapons, nuclear dust, blah, blah. I would say, hey, I'll trade the front, the Hezbollah strikes for more. definition and more delineation on getting the nuclear material out of that country, which ironically we had under Obama. But let me just explain, because if I can get it out of the country, my position inside of Israel is I'm eliminating the nuclear threat. We're always going to be at war here. Our neighbors and us, for whatever reasons, since 1948 are fighting each other, but I don't want to get wiped off the map. And so for me, that would be the move. There's 440 kilograms of uranium, and I would definitely push for that. And you'd find a way to make Trump accept that he's going to have to pay some money up front. I mean, he's going to have to pay to get the strait open. That's just what it is, and he's going to have to accept that. Yeah. Well, he hates that because he watched Fox News 10, 12 years ago, and when Obama was doing that, that they were- They were all aghast at that. But that's the real politic, Caddy. They all would tell you this, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Roosevelt. Churchill would tell you this. There's only so much power that we have, and there's only so much influence that we have on the rest of the world. And whether you're Von Metternich or Henry Kissinger, you pick it, you have to balance the powers, and you have to put everybody in a position where- You have to put everybody in a position where they have a slight political win, even your adversary. And there's been a few unconditional surrenders, the Nazis in 1945, the Confederate Army in 1865, but that's not this. There's not going to be. Trump called for an unconditional surrender of Iran, but good luck, unless you're going to put 1 million ground troops on the ground and you're going to bomb them into the Stone Age, which nobody has the will for, that's also not going to happen. So to me, if I'm Trump, I'm trying to get the deal done, I'm going to pay the money, Caddy, even if it's something I don't like or don't want to do. So I think the other thing that I would do on our situation room, our little rest is politics situation room, there would be a big sign on the door, Anthony, saying, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, you are not welcome here. Because the hawks, whilst there is no deal, the hawks are finding space, whether it's hawks in Tehran or hawks in Washington or hawks in Jerusalem, the hawks are finding space to push for escalation. And that's why we need a deal done soon, because they are circling and they are the ones that are trying to ramp this up again because they don't want the deal. So we need to get the deal done, which means Trump swallowing a bit of humble pie and realizing what he has to do. And that's why we need a deal done. And that's what he has to do. But I don't think, Anthony, I think you and I both agree, it sounds like this morning, I don't think we are anywhere near a deal. Even though President Trump has done his usual, let's juice the Monday morning markets thing of posting on Truth Social that a deal is very close. By my reckoning, that is like the fifth iteration of this thing of America, of Trump saying that the deal is close and then the deal is nowhere near close and it all falls apart and the Iranians walk away. I agree. But he doesn't need the, he's going to say that because that's Donald Trump, but he doesn't need the deal, Cady. What he needs is the freeze. What he needs is the stalemate. And what he needs is to let them sell some oil and get some of our Gulf ally tankers through the strait. Yeah, he needs some opening up of the strait. That's what he needs. Yeah. But that is, at this point, Anthony, that's the deal. I mean, nobody's thinking that there's going to be some big nuclear deal announced. All we want, the priority at the moment is to get the question for you before we go to break. At what point does the smart investor money start realizing that when Donald Trump says that there is a deal near, he's probably hiding something and we are not near a deal? Okay. So it's a great question, but you have to understand how the markets work. The markets are working off of the notion that Trump is going to pump the market on Monday. Exactly what he did this morning. So traders, getting up on Sunday. Remember, I've got buddies of mine. They sit at these huge trading turrets, and they have literally screens dedicated to Trump's truth social. And they have bling, bling, bling notifications the minute Trump says something on his truth social. But the fever and the circuit that you're seeing right now is not going to break anytime soon because they're trading off of Trump's information the same way he is. You see what I mean? And that's just people saying, "Okay," and that's unbelievable amounts of cynicism, but that's just the way it works, the way it works in the markets. And so people getting up on Monday, and it's too late. They got to get up on Sunday, and they've got to look at what the hell's going on and get ready for the Tokyo market to open, Hong Kong market to open, and trade the Trump tweets. And that's what they've been doing. But oil was up, right, in the Asian markets, because they've seen what's happening. Yeah. But I don't think we have any resolution to this for several months. But I do think you're going to get the straight open or partially open, and you're going to get the oil prices into an equipoise. And I think you're going to have a cold peace on this situation, but you're not going to have a resolution because Trump doesn't want to pay the money because of the talk. I think he's going to have a lot more powering that he'll get, that he's Obama-lite. Netanyahu doesn't really want it to 100% stop either, because of the political coalition that's fracturing before him. And the Iranians don't care. They just want to be able to sell oil so they can try to get their economy revived. And so if you take those three points of the triangle, that's a 60-day freeze, let some oil through the straight, and we'll be in this sort of weird equipoise. I had a conversation with a friend of mine, I had a conversation over the weekend with an international economist who had been studying the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. And he was saying that he doesn't think the Strait of Hormuz is ever going to go back to the kind of transport flows that it was before the war. Because if you look at what happened in the Red Sea, when the Houthis started bombing tankers, hitting tankers in the Red Sea, actually the traffic has never picked up fully, even when they stopped doing so. And I think that the legacy that Trump has given the world of this war, it's not going to be a peace deal, or necessarily even a successful nuclear resolution. It's going to be a permanent inflation tax on the global economy that the Iranians have just put in their back pocket, because they know they can shut the Strait at any time once they've had a chance to rebuild themselves and rebuild their own economy. So I think that's a really good point. And I think that's a really good point. I think that's a really good point. Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. 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ZetBound contains Terzepatide and should not be used with other Terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor additives. For more information, visit zetbound.com. Welcome back to the Restless Politics U.S. with me, Anthony Scaramucci and Cady Kaye. Cady? NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. NBC. Yes. They spent a lot of money to fly out to Wisconsin. It was an event with farmers out there and they were trying to get that one-on-one interview with the president and Kristen Welker was asking him normal questions. I didn't think they were crazy questions. I watched the interview, but he didn't like it. Two things about that interview that I think people should be aware of. Trump threw down the microphone. You could hear him crunching the microphone as he stepped up. He was not doing squats, Cady Kaye. When Trump got up, he was wobbling out of the seat and he was in an awkward stoop as he walked away. Because they had the boom mics above them. You can't see that in the shot, but they did. I didn't like his mobility. I'll just tell you that. Yeah. That was not a springy guy there. Look, so here's what happens. They do this interview. It's interrupted by the rain. They keep referring to the rain. Trump is clearly getting irritated. With the rain, even Trump can't stop the rain, but he wants to do the interview. So he does the interview. They cover a whole load of things. And then at the end of the interview, they get to the weaponization fund and Donald Trump gets into January the 6th and how he would like to help those people because they were ushered in by the FBI. I think anyone who watched the images of January the 6th knows that what we saw actually was not FBI agents. And anyway, this was the Trump presidency, not Trump. It was the Biden presidency at this point, so it was his FBI, but I did not see FBI agents calmly ushering rioters in. What I saw instead was police literally having their heads squeezed between doorways and being attacked by these rioters. And from then on, for the next 10 minutes, the whole interview disintegrates and it becomes Kristen Welker doing a good job, I thought, of trying to push the president to produce the evidence for his favorite bugbear. But the 2020 election was stolen and there's a back and forth and she says, "But show me the evidence. There is no evidence. Show us the evidence. There have been 64 court cases. There was no evidence." He's not buying any of it. And eventually he pulls off his microphone and says, "Okay, I'm done," and walks out. He has a history, by the way, of walking out of interviews. He's the only person, fun fact here, did you know he was the only person, as far as I know, to walk out of an Ali G interview with Sacha Byron Cohen? He kind of got the joke and after a few minutes said, "Okay, I'm done with this." But anyway, he did that. There's a couple of things here that I think are worth talking about. One is how do journalists handle Donald Trump? When you have the president of the United States on television saying that the 2020 election was stolen, saying that the California election count, which is currently being counted, is corrupt and crooked, do you stop the interview? Do you focus on one of the lies and just make sure your audience knows it is a lie that the FBI ushered in rioters? It is a lie that the California election process is crooked and rigged. It still surprises me. And it's one of the reasons why I'm just never sure if I would like to interview Donald Trump, because unless you spend your whole time playing fact checker, you're doing your audience a disservice. But he does. He lies. He is clearly in that meet the press interview. What's he actually doing in that interview that matters? It's not so much the relitigation of 2020 or even of January the 6th. He is laying the groundwork for being able to say that the California election that's taking place at the moment was stolen. And he's laying the groundwork for being able to say the midterm election is stolen if it doesn't go the way I want it. Give more context. What's going on in California and tell us how the president is breeding and feeding that sort of uncertainty. So California has, as their officials would say, a slow count process. You are allowed to have your ballot counted in California if you've mailed it in and it is postmarked the day of the election. So any ballot that arrives into the election houses. Counting rooms that is postmarked from the day of the election, on the day of the election, that can be counted, even if it arrives four days later. California mail can be slow. The postal service has been pretty degraded over the last few years, so it's even slower. So they are literally still counting. It can take six, seven days. That's the nature of California elections. It will take six, seven days in November because of this system that they have. And Kristen Wellkin was saying that to the president. That is the California system. It's rigged. It's crooked. They count the ballots. They count everything that arrives that has been postmarked on the day of the election itself. It takes time. But he doesn't buy it. What he's wanting to say, and he says it with such certainty, it's rigged. It's being stolen is what he's saying. He's setting up a process whereby he can say, if I don't win and he sees his candidates as proxies for himself, if I don't win. Then the election was stolen. But actually, maybe it's a dumb system. Maybe you don't like the system. Maybe they shouldn't accept mail-in ballots that arrive after election day and you have to just get your act together and post them two weeks beforehand. But that's not the system. So given that we have the system we have, you want to try and do all you can, I think, to make sure people believe in the integrity of the system because what Donald Trump is doing is undermining public belief. And that's his goal. He's winning at that. He's been very successful at that because a lot of people have grown very cynical. And I've said this, he would have almost been better off for America and the world if he had won in 2020 because if he won in 2020, he'd already be out the pasture and we wouldn't have had this insurrection and we wouldn't have had this electoral stress where he's challenging the integrity of all of our elections and he's making people feel that there's a "rigged system". But I want to flip back to the journalist for a second, Cady. Do you remember Bernard Goldberg? Does the name sound familiar? Uh-uh. Okay. So Bernard Goldberg worked at a place called CBS News, which is considered the Tiffany Network. And he worked for Dan Rather, who was the anchor at CBS News and many others. And he wrote a book about 15 years ago called Bias, B-I-A-S, and it was his interpretation that CBS News. News had a liberal bias to it, and he articulated all the things that he saw at CBS News. It became a nonfiction bestseller in the United States. He went on and did many interviews about this topic, and obviously CBS News refuted it, et cetera. But my question to you as a journalist, someone who has been around for three decades, mainstream news, is it biased, Catty? Is it tilted to the left? So I would say it's Less that it's tilted to the left, Antony, but I do think, and I've heard this from conservatives for years around America, that they've lost the big institutions of democracy like universities and the press to liberals and that it's skewed against them. And I think in one respect, they're right. And that is that the major newspapers and broadcasters of the United States have their headquarters in New York and Washington and Los Angeles. They do not have them in Kansas or Oklahoma or even Texas. And that produces a consensus in the editorial rooms of those media organizations that is generally pro-globalization, pro-elites, pro-education, just all of those people in those editorial boardrooms tend to come. Elite universities have more of a global flavor. They probably are more likely to lean democratic because we know that 90% of people with university degrees end up in cities and they tend to vote more democratic. But I think it's as much the coast of America being out of touch with the heartland of America as it is a deliberate bias. Because I do think having worked in news organizations for a long time, that the. Journalists of reputable organizations, by and large, don't always get it right, but they really try to be fair. I think they have a real commitment to that. Donald Trump does not try to be fair. In 2016, his rallies were a kind of playbook. It was like the greatest hits. The first 30 minutes would be how wonderful he is. The next 30 minutes would be the press can't be believed, they're all rigged. And the last 30 minutes would be an attack on Hillary Clinton. And it was a deliberate strategy. If you undermine the public's belief in the press, even if the press is doing a good job, then you can say that the election was rigged. And you can say to people, don't believe it just because you read it in the press, because the press, after all, is rigged. So I think it's very cynical what he's doing when he attacks the press. And yes, he's playing on some prejudices and beliefs that people have that the press had become skewed against them. And didn't represent their values. But I think it's also his, he is being far more cynical than that. He is just deciding that if I make people distrust the press, then when the press tells them I've lost the election, they won't believe the press. They'll believe me. Scott Pelley, is he liberal? And just for those who may not know who Scott Pelley is, he was just recently fired by CBS News. He was one of the lead correspondents on probably their most successful news program. 60 Minutes, which had a banner year last year, over $200 million of advertising revenues flowed into 60 Minutes. But he got fired because he wasn't telling the line for Barry Weiss and some of the other people at 60 Minutes. Well, and he confronted his boss in a way in a public meeting that, I don't know, I think most people would probably think you're going to have some kind of retribution, some kind of comeuppance for doing that. Is he liberal? Probably. Okay. With a small L. So to me, this is the genius. If Donald Trump and people, please pay close attention. If I'm looking at it as objectively as possible, and Katty gave you a great answer, but I'm not a news person. If I just, I'm on the outside, I would say lowercase L, the mainstream media at the big networks does have a lowercase L liberal bias. It's just not as far to the left as Fox News would tell you or Donald Trump, but it's a lowercase L. But you see that fact. In fact, Katty allows a lot of space for Donald Trump to maneuver it. Okay. And so that's where he gives out this big chant. But it's not just that. I don't think it's just that, Anthony, because Trump rails against, and we've said this before, Trump wants 150% loyalty. 95% loyalty is not enough. And we know that. He wants the MyPillow network everywhere, right? So he will trash Fox News. Right. If Fox News has one item that doesn't agree with him. Yeah. This is not about whether Americans have a legitimate grievance about being excluded from liberal institutions. Conservative Americans have a legitimate grievance. This is about loyalty to Donald Trump and nothing else. Otherwise, why does he go after those networks that generally support him, which he does? I agree with you because his attitude is anybody that's against me, I'm going to obliterate. And he's been doing that. He's been doing that successfully for five decades, so I give him credit. Katty, do you remember the incident between Dan Rather and George Herbert Walker Bush? It happened 38 short years ago. Vaguely remember? Well, I know. I'm remembering the more recent Dan Rather incident that was the one that got him moved out of CBS News. He told a story about George Walker Bush on the news that was not factually accurate and it wasn't sourced well and it damaged him. But this happened. It happened in January 25th, 1988. He's hitting him on the Iran-Contra affair. Okay, I'm bringing this up for a reason. Just stay with me. Bush retorts to him and says, well, you walked off the set for seven minutes, which Rather was sometimes petulant. He goes, I wouldn't want your career defined by that seven minute walk off any more than I want my career defined by the mistakes that we made in that one-off thing called Iran-Contra. And this boosted Bush. This was like, oh my God, Bush is in a wimp. Look at the way he took on Dan Rather and it helped him get to the nomination for the president. And the reason I'm bringing this up is Donald Trump understands this better than anybody. If you have a journalist that's asking pointed questions, and again, even if those questions are true and even if they're not questions, if you press the nuclear bomb on the journalist, the possession bias is towards you, Katty K. Am I right? Yeah, because nobody likes journalists. Okay. So that is the motif that Trump is doing. Don't say that, Katty. You're a journalist. I like you. Okay. You're probably everybody's favorite journalist, by the way. Can I give actually the cynical interpretation of what is happening with CBS News and 60 Minutes? Please. I'm dying to hear it. Right? Should I? I just tried to explain the motif of Trump, but go ahead. Yes. And I think you're right that this has been an easy stream for Donald Trump to mine. I just think we have to be careful to separate what have been legitimate grievances that some conservatives Americans have had in the heartland of America about not having their voices represented in the American press from what is a very cynical manipulation of the public to stop believing the press. So that you can then say the 2020 election was stolen. January the 6th was a day of patriots walking on the Capitol and being ushered in by the FBI. Right? I mean, I think let's not conflate the two things because one of them is disastrous. If we keep going down that road, it's going to undermine our democracy. I think actually behind all of this is something very cynical, and this is just a win for Larry Wilson. From his point of view, this is about trying to make sure that Paramount can buy the Warner Brothers, get that deal through. And so he needs, so Barry Weiss needs to make him happy and make sure that CBS News looks a little bit more Trump compliant so that there'll be less regulatory hurdles to that deal. I think this is just about business and making money. I have nothing to say there because I think that is the exact right narrative and I'm one in 100% agreement with you. In the end, guys, follow the money. Follow the money. How many times have we said that on this program? Amen. Before we go, everybody, I want to quickly remind you about our founding members' mini-series, The Truth About Donald Trump's Health. Katty, Trump turns 80 on Sunday. My God. Okay. Which means we probably don't have 80 more years to go with Donald Trump. But with that in mind, we thought now would be the right time to discuss whether someone of Trump's old age with rumors flying around about his physical and cognitive health, is he fit to serve as President of the United States? Yeah. So the second episode comes out this Wednesday. In the first episode, I spoke to physician Dr. Vin Gupta about the president's health. And I think you're going to be shocked by what he had to hear about the president. If you would like to become a founding member, and listen, sign up at TheRestIsPoliticsUS.com or via the link in the episode description. And while you're there, do also sign up to our weekly newsletter, which this week features a special essay about why America elects old presidents and how that compares with other countries around the world. You might be interested to find out just how well the United States stacks up on the gerontocracy scale. Okay, guys, we will be back later this week. Have a good couple of days. We'll see you then. 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